Numbers 32: In Writing

Reflected,  refracted

we echo each other

across the ripple-

weeping waves of weeks and years

dividing here and there

Am I you, rocking on the river

 curled in your place?

The moment of seeing

when I look back in your gaze.

How can I know

 what is mine?

The locks of longing

desire’s bindings

the shiny strand

sliding through your fingers

with a hook at its end.

What is the price

of being apart,

rooting myself in the rising sun

while you ride off  to the sunset

carrying me along, 

a part of your heart, 

bound by unbreakable debt

Numbers: Chapter 32

What you see

And what is given 

to be taken

We separate

even as we connect

the bonds that tie

Reflected, refracted 

We reach across waters

[For full chapter, click here

After the bringing of the booty in the previous chapter, this chapter highlight the cost of possession. The key word is "mikne"--commonly used as "cattle", but literally "possession, that which was bought": "Now the children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very great multitude of cattle (mikne); and they saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, and behold, the place was a place for cattle". As is thematic in Genesis, the increase of possession leads to a break between "brothers" (a'h--another key word of this chapter). The tribes of Reuben and Gad of-the-many-possession desire to split from the rest of the children of Israel: "we will not inherit with them on yonder side of the Jordan or forward, because our inheritance has fallen to us on this side of the Jordan to the east". Not for nothing is the tribe of Menasseh, that eventually joins them, suddenly identified as "Menasseh son of Joseph": the chapter is raising the specter of the primal split between "brothers" : the sale of Joseph for "profit".
 In a book for of echoes and recreations, this is the most dangerous reverberation yet. Much of the Book of Numbers recreates the earlier books of the Torah: The complaints about the Manna; the demand for meat; the lack of water. Often, the tale of the first generation that left Egypt is retold within the second generation. This is especially accentuated here, when Moses literally re-tells the saga of the wilderness (ba-midbar--the Hebrew name for this book), fearing a twice-told tale, in which the children repeat the sins of the fathers: "behold, you have risen up in your fathers’ stead, an increase of sinful men, to add to God's flaming toward Israel.  For if you turn away from Him, He will yet again leave them in the wilderness, and you will destroy all this people.”
Moses seems to be right on mark in identifying a danger here. There are indeed echoes of the sage of the spies: if the spies were sent to "see the land," and end up  rejecting the "place" (makom--another key word) that "God has given"; Reuben and Gad "see the land" that isn't theirs, and ask for it to be "given" to them: an inversion between seeing, and not wanting what is yours, to seeing and wanting what is not yours. 
Disaster is averted, however, by making the eastern tribe's inheritance contingent on that of their "brothers'. If they bind up their fate with the rest of Israel's, then the nation itself will "give" them the land.]

Numbers 31: In Writing

Take your core

and fling it down outflung ways

Bare your heart to the elements

march it into the fray.

Count and account

the deep crevice and cost

Smooth-sphered despite fissure

nothing is lost.

Sit outside

and count the days fled

wash yourself with scattered

dust of the dead.

Eat away

what you downed, ingested

with fury- fire and flood

loose it to the crested

wave that crashes 

swallowed down, falls

fills the seams of the heart

the veins of recall

 Bring the spent blood,

depleted, excreted

back to the ruby-red heart

to fill and flow

eternally repeated

Numbers: Chapter 31

What goes out

What comes in

Through fire and flood

Inside and out

[For full chapter, click here
"God, the Lord of the spirit of all flesh,set a man over the congregation, who may go out (ts'e't) before them and who may come in (b'o) before them and who may lead them out (ts'e't) and who may bring them in (b'o)" Moses begged, as he asked to appoint a successor. Now, in Moses' final battle--and the first battle to follow the census of those who will follow Joshua to the Promised Land--it becomes clear that "going out" and "coming in" are indeed the key points. This mixed and brutal chapter is united by one theme: the balance and relationship between those who "go outside" and those who "come in."
The soldiers "sent out" to war bring "the booty and the captives and the spoil" back inside: "they brought (b'o)it to Moses, to the encampment." Moses "goes out" (ts'e't) to meet them "outside the encampment", and they must remain "outside" until they can be purified from contact with the dead. The spoil must also be purified before it can be "brought in," in a ritual by fire that echoes the archetypal purification of the Red Heifer--a ritual that also revolves around demarcating "inside" and "outside" after contact with death. The booty itself must be divided equally between those who "went out" to war, and those who remained inside the encampment. From the two halves, each must give a part that goes further in: a tithe to the priests, and a part for the Levites, "the guardians of the Dwelling" that is the core of the encampment. At the closing, the purified booty, "offered to God" is brought all the way, into the heart of intimacy itself: "and Moses and Eleazar the priest took the gold of the captains ...and brought it into the Tent of Meeting, for a memorial for the children of Israel before God."]

Numbers 30: In Writing

Feel density fill

the dental hollows

flitting, flowing

between your lips,

Weave a mesh

around your mind

wrapping, webbing

around your will.

Contours of craving,

caverns of want.

Solidify your soul

to the column of your word,

in bonds the bind

the boundaries of being.

What winds between the twined

the falling flying threads?

Ropes unraveled,

nets unknotted,
rolling on the wind, 

wild in the wilderness 

between bonds 

binding you and me.

Numbers: Chapter 30

What are the ties that bind?

Don't hollow what flees

the hollows of your mouth

Build your bindings
unless bound elsewhere







(For full chapter, click here
"These you shall offer unto God in your appointed Meetings, beside your vows, and your freewill-offerings," closes the last chapter. After detailing all the time-bound, obligatory offerings, we now move to "vows": the voluntary obligations we impose on ourselves. 
In this, we return back to the theme of speech which has dominated this book since the moment Miriam was punished for "speaking" of Moses, which reached its apex in Balaam's curses-turned-blessing. "God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent: when He has said, will He not do it? When He has spoken, will He not make it stand?"
Here, in imitato dei, Israel is to act as God acts, making their words "stand": "When a man vows a vow to God, or...binds his soul with a bond, he shall not hollow his word; he shall do according to all that proceeds from his mouth." 

Yet even as words are given weight, a woman's words are literally undone, creating a strange bookend of women-and-speech: we open with Miriam being punished for speaking, and end with a father or husband being given a right to "unravel" a woman's speech, literally undoing her own relationship to "her soul": she cannot "bind" without her husband/father allowing her word to stand.  This limitation on a woman's autonomy is seen as definitive of the relationship between man and woman (and the use of ish isha lends this passage primordial Edenic undertones): 'These are the statutes, which God commanded Moses, between a man and his wife, between a father and his daughter..."

Yet even as a husband can limit a woman's binding on herself, it does not undo her relationship to God. The vow still exists--it is simply "forgiven." And if giving words definitive weight creates "bonds" , so that your mouth defines your reality, the possibility of "undoing" and making a bond "void" also introduces an element of freedom. A man may make himself like God by making his word immutable; a woman's word is made untrustworthy, but  paradoxically more free.] 

Numbers 29: In Writing

Inevitably turning,

we wax and wane

counter turn to the

ticking quotidian

Trumpet to the dark

and sate the door

enveloped in a roar

With glow slow grow

carve a moon in our core

then celebrate the fleeting

whole, smooth globed orb

to the tick-tock decline

the slice by slice gone

till we return  where we were

the one, the only, 

each day in its day

the remnants we take

into the again-gaping dark

Numbers: Chapter 29

An arc from many to one

countdown to closing

Back to the promise 
of the every day

(For full chapter, click here

This chapter is a direct continuation of the last, completing the detailed list of the offerings for the "appointed seasons of Meeting." Here, we focus on the clustered  holidays of the "seventh month" (commonly known as the High Holy Days). Once again, there is a repeated refrain of the basic beat of the quotidian. Whatever the offering, it is always in "addition to the 'always' offering". 

The structure is highlighted here, with the opening festival on the new moon. A double beat of the ordinary underlying the start of the holiday season: "beside the offering of the new moon...and the always offering."

The structure then takes a sine-curve of growing intensity echoing the moon's wax and wane. At the full moon, we reach the apex of 13 offerings to  "celebrate the festival" of the first day of Succot. From there begins a slow waning to 12, 11, 10... until we reach the single offering of the "eighth day"--the final, extra festival that eases back into the day-to-day pattern of "your vows and free-will offerings."

The canon-like literary structure, with its repetitive pattern of naming the day, and then detailing its steadily declining offerings, echoes the pattern of the "times of Meeting": the careful confluence of repetition and change, the steady beat of "always" with the shifting melody line of appointed days.]

Numbers 28: In Writing

This is my offering

to bind each day:

Trace the Sinai of sun

arcing the sky

a surging pulse of sanctity

diurnal reunion

quotidian call

Watch the moon wax

to  gibbous globe

dangling the dark

See it slow wane,

to a sly smile

waving goodbye

in voluminous vanishing

Consecrate new birth

the sprouting seed

curling over the heavy beat

of steady, solid eternity

Numbers: Chapter 28

 

Each day in its day

Each month in its month 

The sanctity of always 

The circadian Sinai











[For full chapter, click here
From the continuity of inheritance, we move to another kind of "eternity / always" (tamid). This chapter details the time-based offerings at the Tent of Meeting (mo'ed), the Meetings (mo'ed) in time. This chapter to some extent echoes the laws of the festivals in Leviticus 23 but with a beautiful difference: we begin not with the Sabbath or the festivals, but with the everyday: "day by day, for an always/ eternal offering; one lamb at the morning; and one lamb between the boundaries of the evening." From the daily we move to the monthly, sanctifying the new moon, "month by month," The offerings for the new month are brought "in addition" to the "always (tamid)" offering, and this becomes the refrain of the chapter: sanctified time is always an addition to the basic beat of the daily "meeting", the daily recreation of "what was offered out Mount Sinai." Revelation is in the everyday; teh festivals are the high notes that play above it.]